thanks, but ...

this is some good advice for the time but not a solution. It took me quite some time to create this menu from scratch, with a lot of fine-tuning and at the very last stage the whole thing crashed and each detail was lost entirely.

I have to leave tomorrow, my work is not done and I had to buy a working extension from DMXzone (Universal CSS Navigation Menu for $45), since the support ticket remained un-answered. Maybe it was not enough time to solve the problem. DMXzones extension is not that flexible though. It only works with some presets which you could like or not and it needs a lot of fiddling in the style sheet itself, so I find WA's menu writer much more professional with a lot of good submenus full of fine-tuning-features - if it worked as expected.<offtopic>To me this looks similar to crashes of DA's preview problem whenever you use a template. This issue is known for many, many months and is still not repaired. I use verion 2.0.8 now and it still is one of the best extensions I ever used.</offtopic>